Lisa Lee and the crew return to the stage at Bistrotheque on Thursday November 4th, for a new season of performance works-in-progress. Click on the image above for a personal selection of my favourite photos from the last couple of seasons. Some nice images here, but they don’t do justice to the sheer diversity of acts, and the energy, enthusiasm and sheer brilliance of much of the work.

For more on UNDERCONSTRUCTION, check their MySpace. You can find the rest of my pix from UNDERCONSTRUCTION over on Flickr. But most importantly, come along.

I’ve received a few emails recently asking what kit I’m using.

Virtually all the photos here and on Flickr were shot with a Nikon D200 or D300, although a few are from my Leica D-LUX 3 compact. I use the D300 almost exclusively now — the dynamic range and colour are vastly superior to those of the D200, and the metering is way more flexible. It’s a big heavy body, but I love it. Many of my favourite shots were taken with the D200, but I don’t miss it.

Most of the club shots are with on-camera (or hand-held) SB-800 Speedlight flash with the Nikon standard-issue diffuser. That’s powered from an old Quantum Battery 1+ battery pack, so I don’t have to worry about the flash dying or slowing down over a night of work. I occasionally use an SB-600 Speedlight for fill, triggered from the SB800 using Nikon’s CLS pre-flash triggering. I kind-of-hate raw, on-camera flash, and usually try to work with — rather than against — the ambient lighting, which is so integral to the mood of a venue/event. Recently i’ve been playing a lot with slow sync, camera movement and tweaked lighting ratios.

The stage work is without exception by available light.

My usual three lenses are a Nikon AF-S DX 3.5-4.5/18-70 G ED zoom (for general use), with a Sigma 50mm f1.4 EX DG and Sigma 30mm f1.4 EX DC HSM for the available light work. The fast Nikon prime is on paper a better lens than the Sigma (and certainly better built, with faster AF), but my best shots always seem to be with the Sigma: if I had to choose between them, I’d keep the Sigma.

I shoot 14-bit RAW AdobeRGB. with Adobe Bridge/Photoshop CS3 for processing. All my workflow is 16-bit, AdobeRGB — I only downsample to 8-bit and convert to sRGB for web uploads. I keep my Macs colour-acccurate with a Spyder 2 calibrator. Esssential software add-ons are Alien Skin’s rather fabulous Exposure 2 ‘film stock emulator’, and Imagenomic’s NoiseWare Pro. Almost all of my photos get fed through Exposure — for me, the ‘feel’ of the colour processing is a crucial dimension of post-production. NoiseWare is there to help rescue those few shots where there simply wasn’t enough light, meaning I’ve had to shoot at unfeasibly high ISOs.

That’s the nuts and bolts. I’ve just purchased some lights and am planning more studio shoots. I will update this list to include all that when I’ve decided what works best for me.

Questions? Ask them in the comments box below…

Excellent show of polaroid works at the AOP Gallery in Leonard Street. Read more »

Tucked away in a bar at a Casino on the ‘wrong side of Leicester Square’, with a light up dancefloor and some fabulous outfits and performance turns… pix here.

Spent the weekend rather immersed in the world of war photography. I’ve been involved in James Nachtwey’s XDR-TB campaign over the past couple of weeks, and seized the opportunity to watch the documentary about him, War Photographer, at a rare screening at the Barbican. The film is a must-see. If I were screening it, I’d programme it on a double bill with Chris Marker’s Sunless. To me, both Marker and Nachtwey focus unblinkingly into the abyss which — for much of the world — was the twentieth century, yet frame their record of these terrors in a radiant humanism. In Nachtwey’s case, the visual results are stunning, but I do feel a certain ambivalence about his stylistic finessing of such horrors: at first glance, the visual language of many of Nachwey’s photos — unflinching though the view and choice of subject matter may be — suggests they result from fashion shoots in Hell. There is a much longer post than this one worth writing on that aspect of his work.

Watch the film and make up your own minds. For UK readers, your best bet is probably to buy the NTSC Region 1 DVD via Amazon, or hunt the film down on Bit Torrent. But watch it.

Also went to check out the rest of the Barbican’s This is War show. For me the highlight wasn’t the Capa and Taro work, but An-My Lê’s magnificent large-format works, Events Ashore. Go see for her work, if nothing else.